by David Keck
“What do you mean to do?” said Deorwen.
Durand smiled at her. The water would be devilish cold.
“I expect there will be food and some halfway fresh winter gear in these little piles,” Durand said.
“Durand.…” She was very close to him.
“Night will come soon. Be ready to leave this place. You should not wait long.”
Then Durand closed his eyes and pitched into the frigid agony of the water.
He nearly lost the sword in the first shock. He might as well have jumped in scalding oil. Through wincing eyes, he saw that the water plunged into darkness at the cliff’s edge, opening like a great purple throat choked with thunder and splintered glass. Durand kicked toward this grotto of frost and left Creation behind.
The cold seared his flesh and dug hooks deep into the marrow of his bones. He kicked and kicked, blind. The black pain of the place crushed the air from his chest. He kicked and felt the hunger of his lungs forcing him to breathe. And knew that, at any moment, he would give in. Lights flashed with the pounding of his heart. But then his groping hands collided with a shattering bank of sliding needles and frozen gravel.
And he clawed himself upward and into the air.
He surfaced in an eerie, half-lit place and scrabbled onto a floor of icy rubble. He rolled on the broken rock, blinking like a maddened animal. Gasping. The pain drove every thought from his skull.
But he made no noise. He did not call out.
He forced himself to breathe. To calm himself.
He was in a cave. The ceiling was high and black. The falls must have carved a gulf from the cliff face.
Durand cursed without so much as a hiss. He felt his breath coming in spasms. But the Hornbearer might wait within inches, folded like a spider in the shadow. And so Durand forced himself to keep still and get his eyes open and working.
There were country knights who had smaller halls than that cave. One wall—the one above and behind him—was a great glowing curtain of ice, high as a steeple. That would have been where the falls had ground out the rock. He picked out signs of the others who had come before him: surcoats, a cloak, blades all strewn across the rocky floor. Here were the burdens of what must surely be dead men, all stuck to the frost.
He peered deeper into the cavern.
There was a hole, two fathoms off the floor, and a darker chamber beyond. A man would have to bend double, to crawl. But there was something else: a heap of particolored coats and a pale shape huddled in the hollow of the wall below, still as an owl.
Durand thought of all the bodies in the mountains, and he thought of the girl. But he must know.
He ventured across the rubble, cautious of Ouen’s sword, afraid to let it ring from the stones. He must get closer to that owl-like face in the dark. He had to know. But every inch brought him closer to the hole just above. And, if the Hornbearer was anywhere, it must be in that black socket.
Durand crept closer until he was sure that he was looking at a human shape wrapped in woolen gear.
The face was bare—bare or clean shaven.
Then he heard a hiss, nearly like a breath from the black mouth above his head.
A voice spoke: “Durand?”
And the heap uncurled and Durand saw Almora, her hair all across her face. Surcoats in a dozen crests and colors shawled and bundled the shivering woman.
“How have you come here?” she said, very quiet.
“The thing. It is near?”
She nodded. He caught the glint of her eyes. She was looking at the opening over their heads. Durand set a finger to his lips and helped the girl to her feet. She clutched him, squeezing her face against his chest. She was very cold.
“Deorwen and Ailric are at the water’s edge, by the pool. You know Ailric. We will swim.”
Then a hiss issued from the mouth of the inner chamber: an unmistakable, enormous sound that filled the cavern and froze Durand’s breath.
“Go!” he managed. “The water.” He gave the girl a push and turned with the long war sword as the Crowned Hog unfolded from the narrow socket like a spider clambering from its lair. Long limbs splayed. The huge saddle-blank face with its black eyes and absurd crown, thrust into the twilight cavern.
Durand charged, swinging the greatsword, striking a spreading hand. For a moment, the thrall’s grotesque horns caught in the entry, holding the thing like a pillory, and Durand charged, swinging at the flying limbs. But what force in Creation could stop such as the Hornbearer? And indeed, a careless, deadfall blow of the brute’s huge hand sent Durand skidding across the floor.
The great bronze curl of the Horn clanged, and then the Hornbearer was free, looming against the ceiling.
The silent horror flexed and opened its long-fingered hands, finding a finger or two lopped away.
“At least I have marked you,” said Durand.
The thing swiveled its head. And there was Almora, still at the water’s edge.
Durand rang the heavy sword from the icy floor with frozen hands. He gave the sword a second ring.
“Come, you devil! You’ve had an eye on me since Fellwood. Now here I am.” He rang the sword once more on the ice, and the horned face rolled toward him.
He had its eye now, and Almora might get free. She might reach daylight and Ailric and Deorwen. And they could find some patch of holy ground by nightfall and the old Crowned Hog could choke on its fury.
Durand bared his broken teeth and charged the giant. He leapt and swung, and the brute skidded like a carthorse on the icy rocks. A foot stamped down. A fist smacked a hail of skull-cracking stones down all around him.
Then a lash of the thing’s splayed hand wrenched Durand into a cartwheel, sucking the air from his lungs.
He landed hard on broken rock with a flash of light jagging behind his eyes.
The thing picked him up. There was no room for air in the monster’s grasp. Durand saw the damned, faceless face. And the fingers tightened, crushing. He tried to lift the sword still dangling in his fingers, but he could not. And it could not have mattered. There was no air. Only the vast dark face. The sword clanged to the floor.
And the monster stopped.
Down below, Durand saw Almora. She had pried up a blade from the ice and now wavered with the sword in both hands, its point buried in the back of the Crowned Hog.
But the monster had not died.
Durand saw that there were almost twenty paces of rocky floor between the girl and the water.
Almora ran.
Perhaps she had hoped to kill the giant. Perhaps she could not stand to see another man killed, but now she ran.
Durand fell from the Hornbearer’s hand and the thing rushed, swallowing the distance with hopeless speed. Its hand snapped for the girl. Durand saw it silhouetted against the shining curtain of ice. But, as the Hornbearer reached, the thing struck sudden ice at the water’s edge. And it slid.
In an instant, that giant devil of five hundred winters was crashing into the wall of green ice. Water exploded beneath it. Durand saw it twitch around, catching hold before it slid into the deep water, then the towering wall of ice gave way. The darkness shattered and the Eye of Heaven was revealed, its golden beams lancing through the falling ice and the sudden thundering roar of the waterfall beyond, and the air was full of diamonds.
As the Hornbearer exploded from the cavern, Durand found Almora safe in the curve of one wall, looking more sick and pale than any living being Durand had ever seen—but alive. She had thrown herself from the Hornbearer’s path—a fact that had saved her from the thrashing giant and the falling towers of ice.
He beamed like a fool until he saw her eyes, which were wide open and seemed almost to be burning, as immovable as the mountain behind her.
Durand swam the tarn in a moment, hauling the dazed Almora out onto the bank and into the arms of a waiting Deorwen. Even Ailric, still on guard against whatever might next emerge from the ruined cavern, flashed his teeth, as giddy as a child.
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“She’s alive!” said Durand. “We’ve got her back!”
“She will need dry things. Ailric, you brought her mantle. The fur. And some of the men’s things will be stout woolen stuff,” said Deorwen.
She bundled the girl into rugs and cloaks, chafing her skin, forcing embraces when she could do nothing else. Almora had not uttered a word.
Deorwen took the girl by the arms, looking square in her face. “Almora, you will have to say something now. Anything at all, but I must hear you.” There followed a space of heartbeats, but Almora seemed to gather herself. She straightened a fraction and her dark eyes blinked.
“I am free,” she said.
And Deorwen seized her, clutching fiercely.
“You are,” she said.
Durand too felt a fierce sort of joy. He must have looked mad, shaking pale and grinning like a fool. “Host of Heaven! Who would believe it?” He felt that they had torn something back from the face of doom. He was surprised to find bright blood streaming from his mouth, but a split lip seemed an impossible price to have paid for so improbable a victory.
“My father?”
“Will be in Acconel by now,” said Deorwen. “Don’t worry.”
Durand looked into the back of the cave—now open to the Eye of Heaven where ice and stone had collapsed.
“There is no sign of the thrall,” said Ailric.
“It was there,” said Durand. “But I would be happier to see its carcass afloat in the tarn.”
In the rear of the cave, that warren would still be there, still beyond the reach.
Despite his sodden clothes, Durand hauled on his own gear. “By rights we should have a night by a roaring fire, but I think we need to get clear of this place. And there’s not much time.”
“The Hornbearer lives?” said Deorwen.
“I do not see him dead, and we will soon lose the Eye of Heaven.”
Almora stared into the cave from her bundle of cloaks, almost as though the Hornbearer was staring back.
“What shall we do, then?” said Deorwen.
Ailric seemed ready to carry his sword into the Hornbearer’s chamber, but Durand had fought the thing and he knew that a man was too small to face the giant thrall. Only Almora’s desperate attack had saved them, and there was no second wall of ice and stone to drop upon the brute.
Deorwen rounded on Ailric. “You will not stop him there, but only lay your bones in the same tomb as Raimer’s men. I don’t think the Powers of Heaven will grant us two such escapes in an hour.”
“We must get away,” said Almora. “We must all get away.”
“Yes,” said Durand. “We will put as many leagues between the thrall and ourselves as we may in the hour before we lose the Eye.”
“Yet what good will a league or two be to us when that thing comes rushing down the passes behind us?” said Deorwen.
Durand scoured the heights, hoping for inspiration, but saw only leagues of bare rock and ice on every side.
“Why did the devil choose this place?” he wondered.
It was Almora who spoke. “It had been here before, I think. It slipped out to the lakeside when the cave was dark, staring north, its arms clasped tight.”
The girl’s gaze jumped to the spot where the Hornbearer must have kept its vigil.
Ailric crossed silently to the place and looked off into the northern range. “It is Yrlac there,” he said. “Between the peaks, just here; you can see the hills.” He squinted, shifting. “It might be the hills around Penseval, near the Banderol.”
“Where Leovere’s clan kept their trophy horn,” said Durand. “That is what it sees?”
“So I believe,” said Ailric.
“Fine. Fine. But what help is this to us now?” asked Deorwen. “Soon, the Hornbearer will climb from that hole and what will we do then?”
“The Singing Stones,” said Almora. “They cannot be far. When it took me. My father’s men. Some who followed. They were on a ridge above a stone valley.” She blinked. Who knew what visions flashed before her mind’s eye? “One man. He and his horse fell. The man rolled among—they were standing stones. There was a groan, hundreds of voices, low. The thing. It shied like a horse in a fire.”
It would have been Raimer. She was talking about the stone kings.
Durand straightened. How much daylight had they left? How far was Raimer’s grave and that file of stone kings?
“The wards! We must return to the kings,” said Deorwen.
“Yes!” said Durand. “We may just make it!”
* * *
ONCE MORE DURAND led them in a breathless rout. This time, though, he was grinning like a thief who’d escaped with the whole treasure room.
The long mountain shadows swung over the valleys like vast shears. But this was a downhill flight and Durand’s party knew every turning as they scrabbled past dead men and gravel plateaus to finally reach the moaning chorus of stone kings as the twilight ebbed from the Heavens.
They slipped among the stone figures, Durand urging Deorwen to take the girl deeper into the strange place while he stopped in the first rank, his eyes on the shadowed valley behind them. Ailric stayed at his side.
“No sign,” said Durand, watching every ledge and stone of the gorge.
The murk was thick and chill.
Durand had hardly spoken when both men heard something in the gorge—falling stones, a crack, a sharp report, each sound closer and closer.
“We must hope that the kings can hold it,” said Durand. He drew Ouen’s long blade once again and watched around the shoulder of one crude lord of stone. The Hornbearer swarmed into the gorge as quick as a spider, groping forward on limbs as long as masts and towers in the dark.
Only at the last did it check its headlong rush. Twenty paces away, the thing crawled forward, clutching the gravel. Durand saw it pass the low mound of Raimer’s grave.
In the face of this breaker of hosts, there was not blood or air enough in Creation.
Durand cocked Ouen’s sword, but he and his shield-bearer gave ground as the monster came nearer and nearer. It seemed wise to place a few more stone kings between them and the Hornbearer.
“We must pray there is power in the patriarchs yet,” Durand said.
And then, in terrible silence, the horror of Fellwood ceased its advance, hunkering like a dog at the end of a chain. In the blank mask of its face, there wasn’t any human sign.
Only pigheaded stubbornness kept Durand on his feet.
Finally, the great horror stood and, more quickly than Durand could comprehend, abandoned the gorge, stilting from the pass while the night wind breathed over the stone mouths of the idols and set them all singing.
Durand looked to Ailric. “If it had stayed there the whole night,” he said, “I would have let you kill it.”
“If I’d had to watch it another hour, I would have tried.”
* * *
TOGETHER THEY RETREATED to the middle of the stones, where they joined the others, huddling in half-wet clothing and wishing for dry wood and a strong fire. The Hornbearer could still be seen, moving on the ridgeline.
Amid the stones, Deorwen fussed over the girl. “You have been cold and you will be hungry still. I will hold you close as you can stand under these cloaks, and you will eat what you can. We have a cheese and some cold mutton in the bags. You will eat as much as you can stomach. It’s hard that we can make no fire, but stone doesn’t burn. You will be thirsty as well. We must have water.”
They had all seen people—after the siege at Acconel, after Ferangore—who could not shake the mortal dread of the blackest days. Deorwen’s years at the head of the duke’s household meant everyday almsgiving and feeding the hungry. She’d seen a lot of haunted eyes. Durand wondered if they could lose the girl.
“I had water. And those poor boys…” Almora checked herself. “There were woolen surcoats.”
“Quite right. Wool is as warm wet or dry—or nearly,” said Deorwen. “This is good sens
e. After you chased your father into a calends night, I wondered. Now, are you hurt anywhere and too brave or stupid to say so?” And when Almora said nothing, she glanced to the two men looking on. “And you boys? What of it?”
Ailric shook his dark head, suddenly seeming a youth of nineteen or twenty again. Durand only smiled with his broken teeth.
The kings groaned in uncanny harmony.
Deorwen pushed on. “When the Eye returns, we will make for Acconel.”
“I was asleep,” Almora said. “There was a shriek. The tents in tatters. The fires. I remember the spinning fires. And then I was rushing up into the night.” She could not find words for a moment.
It was very dark among the kings.
“It kept to the high places. It leapt and it scrambled. Sometimes it was as still and dead as a tree, rolling that tiny crown in its hands, round and round and round. It killed those men. In the cave, it was the same.…” Her eyes were very still. “It rocked like a caged thing. It fondled that crown. It stared. For hours, it would stare. It dashed those poor men against the walls.”
“The devil,” said Durand. She should not have been able to endure it. But there was iron in the girl.
Deorwen looked into her eyes, calling her back from the place of dark memory. “Almora, we must take as much sleep as we may. Sleep is the best healer for all things.”
* * *
DURAND HAD NOT planned to sleep among the stones, but weariness overcame him in the black hours and he nodded across the bounds of sleep until voices emerged from the groaning of the kings.
He heard a man’s slurred mumble. “I am not blind. I see. Oh, I see how they watch. How they whisper when my head is turned. Always the whispers! Devils everywhere.”
Durand was sure that things were circling like greyhounds at a feast.
Then, of course, he was awake. Still, even there on the mountainside, Durand was sure he had heard these things.
Uneasily, now, he found that he could still make out the wrathful mumblings as the wind ebbed and swelled among the stone kings. It was the faraway sleeper, now in the mountains.
“I am alone,” the sleeper groaned. “Every eye is upon me when my head is turning. They count every breath I draw, but I will not go! What madman counseled that I have a son? An heir between my brother and the crown? No! A devil and his whore of a mother. The boy is the tool she requires to take what is mine and hold it when she has done with me.” Whispers seethed and surged. “It is all poisoned against me. My brother and his army. My wife. My son. Devils! I cannot sleep for the whispers.”